Michael Brea, bit-part 'Ugly Betty' actor, says, 'I didn't kill her. I killed the demon inside her' 

BY MATTHEW LYSIAK
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Friday, November 26th 2010, 4:00 AM

An unhinged actor Thursday calmly described hacking his beloved mother to death with a sword because he believed a demon had taken hold of her soul.

[img_r]http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2010/11/25/amd_yannick_brea_nephew.jpg[/img_r]"I didn't kill her. I killed the demon inside her," Michael Brea said in a chilling hourlong interview with the Daily News in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital.

When told his mother, Yannick Brea, 55, had died in the grisly assault early Tuesday, Michael was unrepentant.

"So be it. It was the work of God," he said.

Speaking with white-hot intensity and unflinching confidence, Brea described a shadowy descent into a world filled with Masonic symbolism and black magic beginning late Sunday when he snapped awake.

"I was sleeping in my bedroom. God came above my bed and reached his arm to me," said Brea, wearing a light-blue prison jumpsuit and slippers. He told his tale while sitting unhandcuffed on a blue chair behind a wood table.

[img_r]http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2010/11/25/gal_brea_apartment_1.jpg[/img_r]"I said, 'God, is my time on earth over?' I heard a voice say, 'Yes Michael, today is your last day.' I asked if I could say goodbye to my family."

The 31-year-old Brea said he told no one about the dream, but the following afternoon, he said he received another sign while at the Prince Hall Masonic Temple in Harlem, which he'd joined a week earlier.

There, he said, a man approached and tried to put a curse on him.

"[He] kept trying to put something in my hand but wouldn't show it to me. I kept opening my hand. It was a Freemason pin. I wouldn't touch it," Brea said.

Felt like Neo from 'The Matrix'

He began feeling ill and left, and while riding the train back to Brooklyn, he said, strangers began speaking to him about his mother.

"I felt like Neo from 'The Matrix.' I began hearing voices and feeling powerful," Brea said. "They were asking about the difference between mom and mother. It was a sign."

When he returned to the family's Prospect Heights apartment, the bit-part actor who once appeared on "Ugly Betty," hugged his mother, a God-fearing Haitian immigrant with whom relatives say he had long been very close.

"I knew I would never see my mother again," he said. "I gave her lots of love."

He went to his room and lit candles, placed a dagger and a 3-foot ceremonial Freemason sword by his side.

Investigators said he had stolen the sword from the Masonic lodge, but Brea insisted his father had given it to him when he was a child.

"It's a powerful sword," he said.

Brea also arranged three saint cards around him - including one of Saint Jude holding aHis mother then knocked on the door and asked him to go to the kitchen and pour water from a pot in which she was cooking three chickens.

"I looked at these chickens lying dead in the pot and a voice told me it was a sacrifice. It was black magic," he said.

Brea left the chickens alone and went back to his room. When his mother asked why he did not do what she had asked, he said she spoke with a different voice.

"She had the voice of the demon. I opened the door with the dagger at my side and the sword," he said.

"I asked, 'Do you believe in God?' She said, 'No, Michael no,' and began screaming. I began slashing her like this," he said, bringing his right hand down in a violent hacking motion.

Sickening trail of blood

Brea chased his mother from room-to-room, repeatedly swinging the sword, leaving a sickening trail of blood in his wake.

"I didn't want to kill her right away. I wanted to give her time to get right with God," he said.

By this point police had arrived outside the apartment, but Brea said he had no doubt he would be able to finish the job.

"I was slashing my mom and I heard the police knocking on the door yelling, 'Michael, open up, Michael, open up,' but I knew they wouldn't open the door and stop me because the spirits were protecting me," he said.

"I just kept cutting her. No one could stop me. I was doing the work of God," he said.

"I'm named after a saint myself - Saint Michael. He was protecting the house from the police. They weren't allowed to enter the apartment."

Neighbors complained that the officers who initially responded failed to do enough to get inside and stop the sword-wielding maniac before his mother died.

Police officials said the officers handled the situation properly and were waiting for better equipped and trained Emergency Service Unit cops to arrive.

When they finally broke the door down, cops found a trail of bloody footprints and handprints on the walls and floors, and Yannick Brea crumpled on her knees in the bathroom.

Her son stood amid the carnage with the sword in one hand and a Masonic Bible in the other.

"I heard voices telling me how powerful I was, saying 'Oh he's good,'" Brea said.

While recounting the gruesome murder, Brea showed no remorse, and his eyes stayed locked on a reporter.

His intensity only broke for a moment when he said he was thirsty and his mouth was dry. Guards gave him a wet towelette to dab at his lips.

Brea said he is convinced he did the right thing.

"Grand Architect of the Universe means God," he said, referring to an expression neighbors said he shouted as he was being removed from the bloody scene. "I was praising God. To you it might sound silly, but in my culture demons are very real."

mlysiak@nydailynews.com



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